The Selling of the Candibots: Bad as You Thought

“We’re surprised it’s been so early,” said Greg D’Alba, chief operating officer for advertising sales at CNN. “And this will probably open the door.”

The early-arriving “it” to which Mr. D’Alba refers, of course, is multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns from the candibots seeking the U.S. Presidency. The pace of such spending has already topped $2 million a week from both the Klinton and Obama spin-a-thons.

What this means is that this whole charade we continue to swallow as a legitimate electoral process is indeed getting even more rotten — at a pace that surprises even seasoned commercial television insiders. Meanwhile, the list of un-addressed dire domestic and international problems also rapidly lengthens. The “political” marketing money gets ever bigger and pours into the idiot box ever earlier. As it does, the “debate” gets ever less substantial and genuine. Lather, rinse, repeat — until the country and/or the Earth implodes and/or explodes.

And, once again, recall that advertising is but the tip the marketing iceberg. Even as they use the inherently anti-rational and anti-democratic medium of television to push your buttons with quasi-promises of eensy-weensy tax shifts and new laws to force the poor and the insecure to buy third-rate private health “insurance,” the “major” candibots are also certainly spending ever-increasing sums on focus groups and other types of marketing research. As in the larger enterprise of big business marketing, their purpose is not to discover people’s deepest needs, but merely to find and exploit weaknesses. The candibots’ end goal is to fill their gaping ego-voids by winning the struggle to use political marketing to sell us a new brand of babysitting the status quo.

This is one area where the best choice right now is to surrender yourself to that other, more genuine kind of “E.D.” — Electile Dysfunction. Prescription: If you find yourself taking these vote-stealing hucksters seriously for more than a quarter-hour, seek immediate help.

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Consumer Trap: The Book

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